Lucio Fontana: the Post-Fascist Masculine Figure
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LUCIO FONTANA: THE POST-FASCIST MASCULINE FIGURE Dr Anthony White, Lecturer, School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology, The University of Melbourne. Abstract: The ‘cut’ paintings of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968) are intensely sexual objects. For many viewers, their rawly coloured surfaces ruptured by deep vertical gashes strongly evoke female genitalia. Fontana’s violent cutting of the canvas has also been compared to the muscular gestures of male ‘action’ painters such as Jackson Pollock. What such interpretations fail to grasp, however, is the critique of gender identity, and in particular masculine identity, at the heart of Fontana’s work. However, as I will show, Fontana relied on an inversion of diametrically opposed notions of maleness and femaleness rather than any deconstruction of the opposition itself. As I outline in my paper, Fontana’s critique first emerges in the artist’s depictions of the male body immediately after Italy’s military defeat in WWII. Fontana’s limp and mangled clay warriors splashed with oozing layers of reflective glaze directly challenge the hard, ballistic ideal of the masculine body theorized in the proto-fascist writings of the Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. Drawing on the work of Hal Foster and Jeffrey Schnapp on the representation of fascist masculinity, I argue that Fontana developed an alternative model of maleness to that encountered in the official culture of Mussolini’s Italy. Accordingly, as I also demonstrate, his work gives insight into the extraordinary transformations in male body imagery that took place in avant-garde and official cultural circles in Italy during the first half of the 20th century. Paper: Lucio Fontana’s ‘cut’ paintings of the 1960s are often discussed as representations of female genitalia. Tobias Berger, for example, recently cited Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World and Lucio Fontana's slashed canvases as part of a modern art historical lineage of vaginal imagery.1 Such comparisons seem particularly apt in those examples of Fontana’s works with a single, vertical tear in a monochrome canvas. As a corollary to this identification of the paintings with vaginal imagery, it is tempting to see Fontana’s attack on the picture surface as an exemplary masculine act. Responding to Jackson Pollock’s mythologisation in the American and European press as a ‘cowboy’ artist, in interviews during the 1960s Fontana described his origins as an Argentine gaucho, an expert marksman who made a living rounding up cattle and sleeping under the stars.2 Such self-descriptions could lend credence to a reading of Fontana’s gesture as a gendered performance, reciprocating the vaginal associations of the paintings with the image of a sharp-shooting, manly artist. This reading of Fontana’s work, however, has been frequently questioned. From the moment these works were first exhibited, critics were uncertain about the vaginal interpretation. As Georges Limbour noted in 1959, “If we say that certain tears open like vulvas, we introduce into these openings an erotic allusion which we feel is probably displaced.”3 More recently Sarah Whitfield has compared works such as Concetto Spaziale simultaneously to vulvas and to the wound of Christ, arguing that the artist uses the “gouged slit to bring together in one image the extremes of the sacred and the profane.”4 For these writers the iconography of such works is extremely ambivalent, and their gender associations are by no means clear. Which account is closer to the truth? In this paper I will argue that Fontana’s work questions pre-existing notions of gender identity. However, as I will show, he relied on a powerful inversion of diametrically opposed notions of maleness and femaleness rather than any deconstruction of the opposition itself. Although the focus of my discussion is Fontana’s post-WWII work, I demonstrate that he drew upon artistic traditions reaching back through the first half-century of Italian history, including Fascist art during the period of Mussolini’s reign of 1922 – 1943 and Futurist art and literature from 1909 onwards. Fontana fought and was wounded on the same WWI battlefields as the famously belligerent and misogynist Italian Futurists, and subsequently made a living as an artist in Fascist Italy. Accordingly, his work gives insight into the extraordinary transformations in male body imagery in avant-garde and official cultural circles in 20th century Italy. In the late 1940s Fontana produced a series of warrior sculptures. Il Guerriero of 1949 is a one meter-high, polychrome ceramic sculpture depicting a standing figure holding a small shield. This work fits into a lineage of athletic warrior images that reaches back through the history of 19th century European neo-classical sculpture, a lineage that is in turn grounded in the ideals of the Italian renaissance and the Classical past. Comparison with a typical 19th century representative of this lineage, Canova’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa, serves to highlight the transformation that Fontana wrought upon that tradition. What we first notice about Fontana’s work in comparison to the Canova is the extremely uneven surface of the sculpture. Instead of the cool, calm surface of the neo-classical sculpture, the surface of Fontana’s work is extremely irregular. Broad gouges, incisions and furrows have been worked into the wet clay surface to create a texture of surprising variety. The chest and legs of the figure have been marked with a swirling volute design, and the material malleability of the clay is extremely evident – there is no sense of the compact, self- contained entity presented by Canova’s figure. Rather, the sculpture, in spite of the static pose, appears to be in a constant state of flowing movement. This can be traced not simply to the handling of the clay but also to the highly reflective glaze applied. The shimmering light effects caused by the glaze cause the work to undergo substantial visual transformations as the viewer walks around the object to get a closer look. In a separate sculpture of the same date and title, we see another warrior figure, this time without a shield, in which the effect is slightly different. As with the above work, the figure stands erect, one leg is slightly raised, arms on the hips, but again the surface is extremely irregular. Deep gouges define the boundaries between limbs, rugged crests of clay seem to literally lurch forth from the surface, and the strident green glaze appears to be running down the figure, giving the impression of melting wax. Furthermore, the reflective quality of the colour captures ambient light and scatters it across the surface of the figure, creating uncertainty about the material composition of the surface. How are we to understand these works? At this period in the artist’s career, Fontana was reconsidering some of the artistic traditions he had been influenced by and contributed to. One of the most immediate of these was the Italian art movement known as the Novecento. Part of the Europe-wide ‘call to order’ tendency that rejected the innovations introduced by the historical avant- gardes prior to WWI, the type of sculptural work produced by Novecento artists was summed up by the Director of the Venice Biennale Antonio Maraini in his text Sculptors of Today written in 1929.5 Maraini praised the work of Libero Andreotti, such as Brandano pescatore of 1928, for a return to primitive Italian models for sculpture, under the influence of which the sculptor's work had “hardened, simplified and squared itself off.”6 The work of Romano Romanelli, the author of hieratic and expressionless portrait busts such as Ritratto di Ardengo Soffici of 1929, was acclaimed for the way in which he “architecturally conceives the plasticity of form in an organic whole.”7 Margherita Sarfatti, a major organiser of the movement, argued that Novecento sculptors “frame the beautiful human architecture within clearly squared-off, geometric blocks...”8 Such comments were in line with remarks made by Benito Mussolini in his speech inaugurating the first Novecento exhibition in 1926, when the dictator praised the work of the group for “the decisiveness and the precision of the line, the clarity and richness of the colours, the solid plasticity of objects and figures.”9 The reason why ideals of 'solid plasticity' or three-dimensionality, geometry and precision appealed to cultural officials within the regime and to Mussolini himself was summed up by Giuseppe Bottai, the editor of the journal Critica Fascista in 1927. According to Bottai, “Fascist art… manifests itself in a simple tendency, generated by the same tendency that operates in the political field, towards constructions that are more solid, stronger and more ample, in the line of the great indigenous tradition of Italian art.”10 As this passage demonstrates, the qualities of solidity and firmness promulgated by artists and critics in this period were readily associated with a traditionalist constellation of social and political values. Fontana often created work that conformed to these theories during the Fascist period. However, he also created works that went against these ideas. Works such as Signorina seduta of 1934, where the artist applied gold paint to the areas of the sculpture depicting the woman’s skin, were described by one critic as seeking to “break the closed form of sculpture” and representing “the decomposition of volume.”11 Such tendencies, which were visible in Fontana’s still lifes and female figures in the 1930s and only began to emerge in his depictions of male figures after WWII, pointedly reject the rhetoric of "solid plasticity" with its connections to fascist political ideals. In what follows, I will focus on the relationship between Fontana's post-war male warrior figures works and the definitions of masculinity and femininity that were expressed in Fascist and proto-Fascist images and texts.